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The numbers are up for CDnowhttp://www.cdnow.com">CDnow;. The world's largest online music retailer reported April 30 that its first-quarter sales increased 288% over the same period in 1997. The company took in $10 million in revenue through the period ending March 31, an increase of 26.4% over the previous quarter, in which revenue totaled $7.9 million.

On May 1, Niles">http://www.nilesaudio.com/">Niles Audio Corporation, Inc., manufacturer of audio/video custom installation components, announced that it had "successfully defended its indoor/outdoor speaker line against would-be imitators."

The Experience">http://www.experience.org">Experience Music Project (EMP), a 130,000-square-foot interactive music museum opening in Seattle in 1999, announced on April 30 that it has acquired 19 recently discovered audio tapes of rare Jimi Hendrix recordings from 1969 and 1970.

Remember when you weren't too busy to make your own cassette tapes to play in the car? How you could link one song to the next by genre or theme or beat or musical key? Remember how much more satisfying it was to listen to those tapes than it was to listen to the radio? No commercials, no announcers, no filler---and you liked every tune.

The next generation of streaming media technology was unveiled last week at RealNetworks' Conference '98 in Burlingame, California. The star of the show? "Bandwidth-friendly" RealPlayer G2, which promises to make noisy audio and glitchy video a part of the Web's past.

Is it merely the tip of the iceberg, or a temporary diversion? Hard to say just yet, but a recent report from the Consumer">http://www.cema.org">Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association (CEMA) suggests that increasing numbers of folks are using their PCs in place of, or in addition to, regular audio systems.

Specialty audio manufacturers did better than expected in 1997, with factory sales as high as $1.4 billion, as reported last">http://www.stereophile.com/news/10148/">last week. More figures from the Consumer">http://www.cema.org">Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association indicate that the High End's good fortune is part of a bigger trend.